Happy New Year!

This year we are going to highlight photographs from the collection here at the Wren Library. For January we have chosen an atmospheric photograph of Frederick Arthur Simpson (1883-1974) crossing Great Court on New Year’s Day.

Add. P. 72

Simpson’s memorial inscription in the college chapel describes him (in translation) as follows:

A graduate of Oxford, Frederick Arthur Simpson was a Fellow of this College for sixty-two years and Lecturer for twenty-five years. His Life of the Emperor Napoleon III, propitiously begun, he left unfinished. He was Dean of Chapel and a preacher of wonderful eloquence. He carefully tended the shrubs in the College gardens. Even in old age he was a kindly friend to those younger than himself. He died in 1974 at the age of ninety.